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Softening up tumours for the kill

5 August 2009

BELIEVE it or not, boosting the blood supply to cancers can make them easier to kill.

Cancers often develop very poor blood supplies that leave parts of the tumour hypoxic, or starved of oxygen. This creates internal pressures that prevent anti-cancer drugs penetrating deeply enough to take effect. “We have identified a way of using drugs to soften up cancers for subsequent treatment,” says Gillies McKenna at the University of Oxford, who led the research.

McKenna and his team have identified four different drugs – including the anti-HIV drug nelfinavir – that can disrupt the process by which hypoxia occurs, …